Oracle Document Capture(ODC) provides many options for you to bring in paper documents into the ECM digital world. But along with many options , it provides many challenges as well, as, no one solution is perfect for all scenarios. Based on your business problem you need to choose , install, configure and customize various tools from the Capture stack.
Like all the basics of a good implementation, you need to have a solid understanding of your data. By data, I mean, what documents, what attributes(metadata) are attached to those documents, where is the related information to pull up various attributes(metadata) , in some other database maybe. Do the documents come up with a barcode for easy identification, like an Expense Report. Does the documents have a set format , like a form , where the positions of the information is constant. Different problem statements need different solutions, maybe a combination of these.
Just keep in mind, every problem is unique and needs special attention.
Oracle Document Capture(ODC) comprises of the following tools:
· Document Capture
· Recognition Server
· Import Server
· Commit Server
All these tools have a place and a reason for their being, We’ll go through each one of these with some samples for better understanding.
Document Capture:
You will go through this tool for a major portion of your use cases. The process is quite simple, You “Scan” a page, You “Index” it(apply metadata) and then you “Commit” it to the repository(UCM).
Once you have the Document along with the identified attributes(metadata) that you want to tag the document with, you need to configure the ODC with this document type and its attributes .
Recognition Server:
As the name suggests, this is a service based utility, which can be configured to read/recognize data based on a barcode (with all sort of variations like 1d, 2d, etc). If you already know the attributes/metadata which goes in with all the documents that you want to check in, you can configure an end-to-end automated solution for checking in a bunch of documents, with no manual intervention.
Import Server:
To check-in digital files (word/excel/etc) into ECM, provides an option to convert to images as well, which can be OCRed for attributes/metadata collection. If you have a dump of files on some shared drive, Import server can be configured to bring in those files to ECM. Import server can also be integrated with Fax and Exchange for importing documents.
Commit Server:
Unattended committing the indexed batches to ECM, as simple as that.
All these utils provide an option to extend the base functionality through VBA macros. You can trap a series of events(more on that later) and manipulate the output.
Lets look at these one after another.
UCM Chronicles 